Jessup had told David that, when giving what he called this “orientation speech,” he had often wept with the terrified captive, and sometimes wept even when she didn’t. It was such a terribly sad moment, Mr. Thorne, very damn sad and exciting all at once. This was no doubt true, for he was a homicidal psychopathic sentimentalist with an intense and disorganized emotional life.

It was not true, however, that the captive might find a secret exit. There was no secret exit from that prison, only the stairs beyond the gate.

You’d be surprised, Mr. Thorne, how nearly all them believed it, poor things. How much they wanted hope when they should have known there weren’t none. Broke my heart every time, it really did.

During the fifteen minutes when the woman still might have had hope, he followed close behind her. From time to time, he snared her and removed—or tore off or cut off—another piece of her clothing, until she was naked when her time ran out.

At some point in her desperate search for an exit, she would try locked doors and hear the cries of the women imprisoned behind them. Perhaps her hope then diminished. And if she still held fast to hope in full strength after that, the bleakness of her situation couldn’t be entirely denied when she fled into the room where Jessup kept the wrapped bodies of his mummified future harem.

When the house had been heated and cooled, perhaps fresh air moved through this lower realm. But now there was a dank smell and the muskiness of mildew.

Before exploring farther, David returned to the stairs and gazed at the open door at the top. His psychological vulnerability encouraged a sense of physical jeopardy as well.

Whatever he might be, however, Stuart Ulrich was not the serial killer who had ruled this domain for almost twenty years.

Anyway, David had wired the man twenty-two hundred dollars for this tour and had spoken to him more than once on the phone. If he disappeared, there was a trail to follow.

It made no sense to fear that Ulrich would imprison him. The apprehension he felt, the claustrophobia, wasn’t occasioned by any risk he faced, but by empathy for the women who had perished here—and by the dread that Emily Carlino might have come awake in this receiving room with the sweet taste of chloroform on her tongue, under the pitying, hungry, honey-brown stare of Ronny Lee Jessup.